03.05.12

This is Phoney “7″ all over again folks. The latest revelation is that “8″ on ARM will not fit into the “management” system that M$ uses on other hardware… I imagine that will prevent most organizations from issuing ARMed gadgets running “8″ to staff or students. With GNU/Linux there is no such limitation. SSH running on an ARMed machine can do the same as on any x86/amd64 system.

Puh lease. First, calling people names is not journalism. It’s also not nice. Make money if that is your goal. But don’t pretend it will keep the code more open or grow the pot of code anyone can freely use. It won’t. It will produce a lot of Apple wannabees, who will take the code and run away with it. At least be honest. What is the benefit of Open Source code if it becomes proprietized and locked up? It’s the difference between Open Source and Free Software. And it’s a difference that matters. Having code contributions back is what builds advantages for Free Software developers to be able to compete with the proprietary dudes, who otherwise have all the advantages. And that leads to more software that anyone can use, modify and share. Do you want the whole world to be like the Apple app store? *All* you can do is look. That’s where BSD-like licenses take you, because they can. And I am very sad to see IBM’s Rob Weir link to this article on Twitter, as if it’s a good thing. Businesses do what they do, because of the way they think. They will always lock you in, if they can. But the community should not be confused. I mean, what did the BSD guys get out of Apple? Apple is making megabucks from their code, and they get nothing? What businessman would consider that a good deal? Businesses want code for free and without any obligations to give back anything. They don’t want to pay and they don’t want to contribute back code, and if you are stupid you will use a license, like the Apache license, that lets them do it. Because then when you set up your business with your code in competition with them using their code for *their* business, they will out-market you, and your business will die.

This is from Groklaw’s news feed and is worth repeating. As usual, the non free software people insult the people they would convince to give up code without strings by calling them rude, irrational and unpleasant. In reality, GPL and GPL3 are both growing and doing well.

Has Stratfor, which maintains various contracts with the Defense Department and other federal agencies, penetrated the US intelligence establishment for its own benefit? (“Having had our property stolen, we will not be victimized twice by submitting to questioning about them,” Stratfor said in a statement on Monday; the company did not respond to a message from Mother Jones.

Today WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. … They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods

Wikileaks noticed 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange and outlines many of the above stories of corruption.

By saying OWS posed a threat to critical infrasctructure, the DHS was calling OWS terrorists. They did this because the owners of the infrastructure, aka banks, told them to. DHS then smeared OWS and coordinated the crackdown with local officials.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out. …The judge picked the lawyers [and] side-lined the legal “A-Team,” like Cajun trial lawyer Daniel Becnel, guys with the guts, experience and financial wherewithal to go eyeball-to-eyeball with BP and not blink.

The claims process was already a joke bad enough to merit RICO accusations, and BP hopes to squirm out of that. There is some hope for Federal lawsuits but so far the Federal government has worked for BP rather than for citizens.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

In recent years, Microsoft has emerged as Google’s chief legal antagonist, working publicly and privately to get antitrust cops in Washington and Brussels interested in Google’s activities. As part of his new job, Mr. Long will likely continue those efforts before the FTC

The source article is behind a WSJ paywall. The revolving door looks a lot like bribery and stinks of corruption. See also this failed piece of lobbying.

The difficult ethical issue concerns stealing and publishing emails, such as Antisec did to Stratfor and parties unknown did to climate scientists. This is wrong, but it is a small wrong compared to the alleged wrongs of the targets.

the Pentagon is getting worried and thus intensifying its agitprop to ever more manipulative extremes. Last year, for example, it cemented its first full sponsorship of a major film, X-Men: First Class, integrating the movie into recruitment ads. It’s now going even further, fully financing its own feature-length film, Act of Valor,

Protesters in Portland, Oregon, and Tucson, Arizona, faced very different weather when they hit the streets yesterday, but they had one thing in common: they were among 70 cities nationwide where Occupy activists and others spoke out against members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose decades-long history of authoring and pushing pro-corporate legislation through the nation’s statehouses has been criticized for strangling political and economic participation across the country.

It was apparently not enough to obliterate funding for bike lanes and walking paths and kids trying to get to school. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants to keep our tax dollars from paying for public transit as well. … Republican leaders apparently believe that bike paths, trains, and buses are all a part of a vast United Nations plot to demolish the “American way of life.”

Oil companies don’t want people to have alternatives to burning gasoline.

Censorship

Article was removed from Google indexes by a porn company complaint on January 20th, while it was important. An obviously non infringing article by Torrentfreak was also censored. The company sort of apologized, saying their robo-censor was in error.

The Indian government wants Google and other Internet companies to evolve a mechanism to quickly remove objectionable content … This step is in accordance with Google’s long-standing policy of responding to court orders

Google is more often in the news than Bing/Microsoft for two reasons, Google puts up a fight and Gates owns or indirectly controls a large portion of traditional media.

the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world.

NAFTA [and other free exploitation treaties] included an array of extraordinary new rights and privileges for foreign investors that incentivized offshoring of jobs and exposed an array of our domestic environmental health, land-use and other laws to attack. … Most stunningly, these new rights in a public treaty are privately enforceable. A little-known mechanism called “investor-state” enforcement allows foreign firms to skirt domestic court systems and directly sue governments for cash damages (our tax dollars) over alleged violations of their new rights before UN and World Bank tribunals staffed by private sector attorneys who rotate between serving as “judges” and bringing cases for corporations.

Intellectual Monopolies

Facebook is currently fighting the patent at the Patent Office. After re-examining the patent, an examiner rejected the patents claims—which would render the patent invalid—but the rejections have been appealed.

There is speedy justice for the rich and powerful but same system allows the rich and powerful to ruin the rest of us.

A Luxembourg company by the name of Core Wireless Licensing has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in the Texas Eastern District Court. Their wholly-owned subsidiary in Texas known as “Core Wireless Licensing Ltd” is holding all of the pertinent documents in this case. The bewildering twist in this case is that the eight counts brought against Apple are using Nokia patents. A settlement between Nokia and Apple was announced in June 2011. The settlement somehow now drags Apple into infringing 3GPP standards…. -

Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations